Originally published in the

As a short-story writer, poet, and translator in
twentieth-century Argentina, Silvina Ocampo lived and wrote within several long
shadows. Virtually synonymous with that time and place, Jorge Luis Borges
loomed large over every aspect of its literature and left little for anyone
else to do or even think of. Ocampo’s oldest sister, Victoria—the founder and
editor of Sur, the journal and publishing house that brought South American
Modernism to the fore—was also a domineering figure of her era. Married to
Borges’ friend and occasional collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, the youngest
Ocampo sister was surrounded by the giants of her milieu, and if Bioy Casares
and Victoria Ocampo worked in Borges’ penumbra, Silvina Ocampo worked within
his centermost umbra. Time has not reversed these relationships, but as Borges’
apotheosis has transformed him into a fixed star in the literary firmament, his
spreading radiance has brought even some of his lesser-known colleagues’ faces
to light. New York Review Books’ recent compendium of Ocampo’s fiction, Thus
Were Their Faces, collects more than forty of her short stories from the
1930s to the 1980s and attempts to distinguish her as a unique voice while very
clearly illustrating her tertiary position during those Borgesian decades.

Ocampo originally trained as a
painter, studying with de Chirico and Fernand Legér in Paris when she was a
young woman, and when she returned to Buenos Aires and dedicated herself
entirely to writing, she brought a visual sensibility and an eye for detail to
her work that fills its pages with a teeming and tactile mass. In her long
story “The Impostor,” which presents itself as the journal of a young man who
may or may not be the imagined alter ego of another young man who ends up
killing himself, she recounts an almost senselessly meticulous progression of
occurrences among the densely object-rich summer estate where the two
distrustfully circle each other. Ocampo describes every room and every object
on the shelves and in the closets, overloading the reader with front-end
details while very slowly allowing the characters’ background realities to warp
into bizarrely repeating patterns. It’s an interesting idea, and there’s a lot
to look at and notice in it, but despite her visual sharpness, Ocampo has a
very dull writing hand. The key Borgesian influence here is Henry James, who
often comes up with ingeniously twisted ideas but ends up larding them with the
most tedious narrative textures and very quickly loses interest in their meat
as he dutifully draws out their flesh. Borges had the magic ability to extract
all the best influences from his masters while discarding all their chaff, and
in his hands James mixes with Kafka and Chesterton and countless others to
bloom into works that were as beautiful as objects as they were interesting as
concepts. In Ocampo’s fiction, the influences are largely untransformed, and
her often fascinating ideas don’t ever rise up into self-realized flowers that
the reader can savor.

Ocampo translated Poe, Melville, Swedenborg,
and Dickenson—a thoroughly Borgesian grouping of authors—and she very closely
follows her more illustrious colleague in how she absorbs them into her own
work, but to much less effect. She loves the obsession and intricacy of Poe,
attempting in her story “The Perfect Crime” to create a water-tight murder plot
in much the same way that Borges did in his story “Emma Zunz,” but she merely
produces a trick while Borges’ story mirrors Poe’s true psychosexual
grotesquerie. Transforming Melville’s overwhelming prolix, Borges creates “The
Library of Babel” and “The Aleph,” in which he crafts endless Melvillian enumeration
into tiny, dazzling snowglobes, while Ocampo merely lists everything in a
child’s bedroom, without stacking it into any kind of artfully composed
arrangement. Reflecting Swedenborg’s inspired mysticism, Borges creates “The
Writing of the God,” in which an imprisoned Mayan priest discerns in the
patterns of a jaguar the secret divine words that can set him free, while in
“Report on Heaven and Hell” Ocampo explains how angels and demons will try to
entice and trick the dying into following in their respective directions, the
two-page story serving more as a brief musing than as a miniature world. Ocampo
attempts to channel Dickinson’s interior weirdness more overtly than does Borges,
but while Borges reflects her Shakespearean fireworks with his own dazzling and
densely inventive thrills, Ocampo merely seems sadly downbeat, with her stories’
weirdness merely described and implied rather than surreally conveyed.

While much of Ocampo’s imagination
and style exists as a kind of Borgesian subset, there are several key
differences between the two that may entice readers who are interested in a
different perspective on the emerging magical realism of the period. Ocampo is
a much more domestic writer than Borges, focusing on interior drama and
development rather than on paradoxes and theoretical imaginings, and her Dickensonian
isolation is much more traditionally personal than his. Ocampo also dispenses
almost entirely with displays of erudition, allowing her characters’
consciousness to fix the stories’ parameters rather than having it all sifted
through the infinite Borgesian kaleidoscope, making her more appealing to readers
who are alienated by Borges’ dizzying library of Babel. Yet while Ocampo is
more interested in characters exploring the limits of their sanity than in cosmic librarians exploring the limits of the known universe, her work is paradoxically
much colder and much less emotionally engaging. Borges isn’t at all a character
writer, but he gives a lot of himself in his work and centers it all with his
own generous and vulnerable humanity, while Ocampo’s characters are more like
sad, distant zombies. Entirely lacking Borges’ vivacious shimmer, Ocampo’s
world and voice are ruminative rather than exploratory, seeming to exemplify
Cynthia Ozick’s lament that, “after Kafka, after Borges, what is there to do
but mope?” If Borges’ infinitesimal labyrinths can be likened to Bach’s
endlessly inventive Goldberg Variations,
Ocampo’s fictions are more like sad, slow, minor-key dirges, with an emphasis
on the word minor.